Advice Line | Bob Lewis | InfoWorld | Starting a consulting business | September 23, 2007 08:49 PM

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Starting a consulting business

September 23, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Starting a consulting business

Dear Bob ...

I am pursuing a career as an independent contractor in IT PM and have 15+ years of overall IT experience. I have primarily worked through recruiters, but would really like to be out on my own, generating my own business and keeping more $$$ in my pocket. Any ideas on how to start and run a successful independent IT consulting biz would be of great value.

I'm especially interested in what you think the next big trend in IT management or consulting will be. Right now everybody is going ITIL crazy, but I think eventually companies will see the limitations of ITIL and canned processes in general.

- Hitting the streets

Dear Streethitter ...

Your consulting business depends on a lot of factors. It sounds like what you really want to be is an independent contractor. The difference between this and a consultant is that companies engage consultants in an advisory capacity - to help in direction-setting, organizing things and so forth - for limited periods of time. They engage contractors to augment their workforce, either because they don't have one or two specialties available on staff or because they just don't have enough staff to handle the needs of a project of some kind.

The biggest difference between the two as far as running a business is concerned is that consultants have to be better at selling, since their engagements tend to be shorter. Either way, though, success, for all but the highest-visibility consultants, comes from maintaining a strong network of colleagues within potential clients, so when you're between engagements you have enough sources for the next engagement to be reasonably likely to find something before you run out of savings.

So far as the next big thing: My own opinion is that integrating business process improvement with software requirements and specification is going to take hold as the right way for businesses to move forward.

ITIL will also be an important force in the industry for some time to come, in spite of its shortcomings. It is, as its proponents continually remind me, a framework, not a collection of canned processes. Put differently, it's a scheme for categorizing and relating the different processes required for success, not an account of how those processes should be put together.

It still has shortcomings, but not so severe that it offers no value.

My candidate for best long-term bet: Good project managers will be in short supply so long as businesses need to not run exactly the same way next year that they did last year.

Which is to say, until long after both you and I are ready to retire.

- Bob

Posted by Bob Lewis on September 23, 2007 08:49 PM

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